The first Newsletter!OK ! Here we go! Welcome to the newsletter of a guy who isn’t even published yet! Crazy, right? Well here’s the deal – I’m going to be published this year. I should have an Anthology and the first novel in an Urban Fantasy trilogy done and released by the end of 2024. So…I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
So first of all, I’ll be teaching myself the professional way to self-publish by releasing an Anthology of Horror shorts that will come in at about Novella length and be offered as e-book only just to get my feet wet with Amazon and other publishers. That should be published by the end of August. There will be a big launch announcement and the price will reflect it’s length. Coincidentally, August is also my target for the first draft of my Urban Fantasy novel to be finished and ready for Beta Readers. Anyway, back to the Horror anthology. I have a bunch of short stories and flash fiction that I’ve put together over the years and polished up for various submissions and writing contests. This means that, for the most part, they were written with guidelines and themes, word counts, etc given to me by the requesting/judging entities. I found many of them to have horror elements to them, but many are not what you’d consider “traditional” horror at all. Still, some of them are stories I’m quite proud of, and I thnk they deserve to be out there available for people to check out and enjoy. So there. On the personal front, as this is my first Newsletter, I’ll just share a little about me. I’m a professional martial arts and self-defense instructor who is closing his full-time school at the end of February. I’m 51, and have a few physical challenges that make 26 hours a week of training and teaching on the mats simply too much for my joints to handle. So I’m moving my program into two Rec Centers and only teaching three days a week, for a total of 9 hours. This also meant I had to find another job, so I did. I’ll have a boss for the first time in 12 years starting in March…not sure how I feel about that…lol My program was fully inclusive and, as far as I know, I am the first instructor in history to create a fully adapted curriculum for my entire martial art system from White to Black belt for three different mobility levels. It took about 8 years to build a curriculum from the ground up for wheelchair students, mobility-assisted students (such as walkers and crutches), and students with unimpeded mobility. Then I added skill sets and adapted/modified/ accommodated pedagogy for students with other challenges so that we could all train together at the same time on the mats. I did this by keeping the core theory and application intact, and adapting techniques to fit the realities the students faced. Now my program is changing and will be very specifically aimed at students with special needs and challenges. If you want to know more, you can look here: But what this meant for me was that I could look to get jobs that would give me some time to write each day, and that’s what I did. Thanks for hanging out with me. Next Month I’m going to share a Flash Fic story and tell you all a bit more about my Urban Fantasy series that I describe as Harry Dresden meets Harry Michaelson on a bad day. And if you don’t know the two Harry’s, you’re missing two very different but brilliant authors. Read the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher and The Acts of Caine series by Matthew Stover TODAY! Daniel Nick
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